I’ve gotten into the
habit of “documenting” my attempts to get closer to a new tune I am trying to
learn by video taping multiple “takes” of my efforts, and posting them on my
YouTube channel, clearly marked as successive endeavors to play the tune in a manner
that (hopefully) demonstrates a capacity to improve.
I suppose my efforts
don’t always follow that trajectory. I
suppose successive efforts can get further from the tune. When that happens, as it has in one recent
instance, having the various “takes” allows me to see where I went off
course. Did I focus too much on
capturing the entire melody without thinking how to translate the tune into
clawhammer? Was I too predictably
rhythmic to the extent of leaving something out in a way that pushed me further
and further from the melody? Or have I
simply not managed to integrate the elements of the tune, have I failed to find
the tune’s core character, and missed its musical point completely?
I talked about one
such effort in my Little Bear Banjo Hospital blog recently (8 August 2014):
In this musical
adventure, I was trying to get at Wade Ward’s Old Joe Clark, inspired by Stephen Wade’s rousing interpretation of
the tune:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-Z9Bqq_Hug
I think
I’ve come further since that blog:
And in this instance,
I’ve had Dan Levenson’s personal intervention in the form of his Banjo Hangout
“Tunetorial,” a weekly informal teaching video that Dan posts:
But I’m still not
that much closer to understanding Wade Ward’s playing. I still don’t have the equation in mind that
will get me closer to the way Ward played the banjo, producing his own unique
rhythmic sense that accented his fiddler friend Uncle Charlie Higgins.
I get that he plays
drop thumb on “internal strings” and uses that scratch followed by a downpick
on the 1st string, twice, but that gets me closer to elements of his
style, not the style itself.
Ted Ingham observed,
in a 2009 Banjo Hangout thread:
One
tip is that Miles Krassen's clawhammer book relies on Uncle Wade a lot, and his
tab arrangements include a lot of "internal drop-thumbing" which
seems one of the keys to his style. Ward often plays the 2nd string in combo
with a drop-thumb to the 3rd, or ditto with the 3rd and 4th as part of his
rhythmic accompaniment. I think this gives his playing a great rhythmic
complexity and hop, definitely analogous to Monk. (See: http://www.banjohangout.org/archive/141087)
In the same thread,
David Douglas noted:
Not
long ago I went to a Bruce Molsky concert and I cornered him before the show to
ask him if he had an inspiration for his technique of frequently sounding his
4th string while playing banjo (not drop thumbing, doing it in place of the
brush stroke). He immediately answered "Wade Ward", his first
inspiration on OT banjo playing! I went home, relistened to some Wade Ward
recordings (he was also my very first OT banjo inspiration) and, lo and behold,
there it was, right in there. I guess I'd been missing this little subtly all
these years. I suggest trying to throw that into the mix and seeing if that
brings you closer to Wade's sound.
“Bruno25” added:
…
The way he plays June Apple, part A, coming in with quarter notes on the first
string; 5th fret, open, 5th, open... Should be pretty darn simple, but not when
he does it. You hear musicians talk sometimes about how sometimes it's more
important what you leave out. I don't think anyone got that any better than
Wade.
Now, Stephen Wade
took another look at my most recent hack at the tune Old Joe Clark, and suggested an interesting exercise:
In
words can you describe how wade ward plays the piece? Can you tell us about the
degree of physical pressure he uses in his right hand? Can you tell us about
the tune and its several parts? It occurs to me to try this exercise. It's
something you can do readily and requires no new or latent skills and it may
help you sort out your next steps in mastering the piece.
Stephen also
emphasized the importance of just listening, listening repeatedly, to Wade
Ward’s approach to a variety of tunes. So
for a week I spent about two hours every morning listening to a loop of the
Field Recorders’ Collective (FRC) CD by Ward, fiddler Charlie Higgins, and Dale
Poe (on guitar):
I found it harder to
listen to the banjoing, separating that sound from the dominant fiddling of
Charlie Higgins and the powerful rhythmic guitar work of Dale Poe. I found it easier to focus on the fiddle work.
I came away with some sense of the idioms Wade Ward deploys in working with his
fiddler.
Ward’s playing is
elusive, eccentric, and perhaps unpredictable.
Maybe that is its charm, and the source of the utter fascination with
which old time banjo players pursue elements of his style. I do find it intriguing, even captivating.
Recently, a musician
familiar with, indeed adept at all these styles suggested to me, in response to
my query, that Wade Ward's approach seemed almost to be the inverse of Dwight
Diller's attack. He made the case that if Diller's rhythm was
"bump-a-ditty" the Wade Ward's was "ditty-bump."
I'm not exactly
certain that this gets me closer to being able to capture any of the equation
at the core of Ward's style, but it does hint at an interesting dimension of
this playing style, a unique idiom that might be part of the equation of the
Wade Ward sound.
And I am reminded of
the reason why some idioms, linguistically, do not necessarily contribute to
the vibrancy and strength of a language, over time fall out of favor or become
surrounded by more effective renditions of an idea, and are replaced by other
idioms or overtaken by slang.
Nevertheless, Stephen
Wade emphasized that the challenge to catching this particular player’s style begins
with listening rather than playing. He gave me this guidance:
--
Listen to the
original.
--
Let that model
imprint itself on you.
--
Think about what
you're trying to achieve.
--
Think about the distance
between your version and your goal.
--
Get acclimated to
using your ear.
--
This does not happen
overnight.
--
It's a skill that one
forever builds.
Back to the drawing
board…
1 comment:
So, I'm not the only one chasing after Old Joe Clark! I enjoyed reading your thoughts on pursuing the tune.
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